The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some networking applications require switching between a high number of ports. For example, a typical data center includes a large number of servers, and switches to communicatively couple the servers to outside network connections, such as backbone network links. As another example, a high-volume website server system (server farm) can include a large number of web servers, and switches to communicatively couple the web servers to backbone network links.
In such applications, switching systems capable of switching between a high number of ports are utilized so that traffic from a backbone network line can be routed to a large number of servers, and vice versa. Such switching systems can include a large number of switches, and each switch can be capable of switching between several ports.
With bridge devices, operational characteristics are often defined by various standards such as the IEEE 802.1Q standard or others promulgated by the International Engineering Task Force (IETF), for example. In some instances, Layer-2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN) technologies are utilized to implement a logical bridge on top of a Layer-2 or Layer-3 infrastructure network; examples of such technologies include VPLS (Virtual Private Local Area Network (LAN) Service), MAC-in-MAC, and certain emerging wireless local area network (WLAN) standards. “MAC-in-MAC” (sometimes referred to as “M-in-M”) refers to the IEEE 802.1ah Standard, which defines an Ethernet frame encapsulation that provides other tags so that routing in the service provider domain need not be based on the MAC address in the Ethernet frame. In this way, the customer and service provider domains can be separated.